Mei-Ling Hom: Yun Nan = Southern Clouds

Mei-Ling Hom: Yun Nan = Southern Clouds

Mei-Ling Hom’s new ceramic work, made while in residency with North Carolina self-taught potter Dan Johnston, continues her ongoing contemplation of clouds: their endless and ethereal forms and the metaphorical possibilities they hold.

Hom captures this degree of variety in both the shape of her sculptures and the firing process she employs. Bulbous forms puff skyward and compress into the ground. Scale shifts to encompass both the collassal and the intimate. Sculptures even correspond to others, with aligning concave recessions and convex protrusions. The surface of each peice, furthermore, is unqiuely marked by the physical brutality of the 2300°F wood-fired kiln. Traces of ash, which bind with the clay's exterior during cooling, highlight the patterned imprints left by the artist's hand. Many sculptures also show the subtle marks of where they once touched others, a product of Hom stacking her sculptures during firing. For some installations, Hom sculpts multiple cloud forms of varying proportions and fires them together in a single stack, only to then restack the pieces in a different configuration, creating a new original composition.

The artist also cites a number of historical and cultural precedents as influential to her thinking about clouds, among them: Japanese screens, which often use clouds as spatial dividers and, as structures, are themselves used to separate architectural areas; the phoenetic similarity between the Chinese words for cloud and luck; the prevelent use of in many art forms of clouds as the homes and transports of dieties.